There I was, in April 1993, marching for Soviet Jews, again. This demonstration was neither as dangerous nor as dramatic as ten Jews confronting the Kremlin. It was neither as overwhelming nor as global as 250,000 Jews marching in Washington. Still, it was as exciting and empowering as the other protests—and more fun.
This time, instead of marching on Capitol Hill and targeting the Soviet government, we marched on our own parliament in Jerusalem. Instead of waving placards and shouting slogans, we wielded brooms.
Fifteen thousand of us demanded that the Knesset pass chok tkufat nikayon, the cleaning internship law. It paralleled chok tkufat nisayon, the professional internship law, which imposed a stazh, an apprenticeship, on professionals before they could recertify in Israel. Our “law” added an obligatory internship period of nikayon, sweeping floors or tidying apartments. The more advanced your degree, the longer your cleaning assignment. For young engineers, three years. For academics, five years. For professors of medicine, ten years.
Actually, no such proposal reached the Knesset. We were waving our brooms with our tongues firmly in our cheeks. We were echoing the Soviet law that said the more advanced your degree, the more your exit visa cost. Some actors, freshly arrived from Moscow’s greatest theaters, impersonated harsh bureaucrats, barking out each profession and its proposed length of cleaning services.
This demonstration was one of many dramatic moments as hundreds of immigrants came to Israel by the planeload, week after week. By 1993, the four hundred thousand Soviet immigrants we expected had already arrived. The total soon exceeded one million.
With the number of professionals arriving daily, it wasn’t surprising to see so many unemployed or underemployed. Who could reasonably expect an appropriate job right when you land in a foreign country?
Most of the Russian immigrants—as they were called, regardless of where they came from in the Soviet Union—had been raised as I was. Absolutely assimilated, they had followed one guideline: “You are a Jew. To succeed in this anti-Semitic environment, you must be number one in physics, mathematics, chess, music, doesn’t matter what. But that’s how we Jews survive.”
Their drive became their identity. After reaching the professional elite in a country of more than two hundred million, they moved to a country of five million. Almost overnight, the number of Israel’s doctors, engineers, musicians, and chess players doubled.
“What do you call a Russian Jew who walks off the plane without carrying a violin?” Israelis joked. “A pianist!”
It became a stereotype: the night watchman with the PhD, the orderly with the MD, the maid with the concert gold medal. The reality was more subtle: the professor teaching high school, the engineer fixing televisions, the classical violinist giving music lessons.
More irritating than the employment problem was how dismissive Israelis were about it. Israeli society downplayed how many people felt crushed by the mass displacement. The Russian Jews of the First and Second Aliyah, around the turn of the century, had sweated away in the fields, draining the swamps. The 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries in the 1950s and ’60s, the Mizrahim, languished in ma’abarot (makeshift absorption camps), then helped make the Negev desert bloom. “Look at the country we created when we came and paid our dues,” we were told. “Why should your immigration be different?”
The Israelis’ Zionist logic was clear: The suffering parents are like the Bible’s lost generation of Jews, who wandered the desert for forty years. Their children will grow up in Israel and go through the melting pot of the army. Then, they’ll become real Israelis, just like us!
Soviet immigrants resisted this life sentence. Our street-sweeper demonstration was another expression of our refusal. The minister of absorption, Yair Tzaban, a social activist from the Meretz Party, rose to speak. But, feeling empowered by the brooms, the demonstrators shouted, “NO! WE WANT THE CLEANING LAW. WE WANT THE CLEANING LAW.” A key lesson of Moscow theater: to make your protest memorable, push life’s absurdities to the grotesque extreme.
The demonstration didn’t happen in a vacuum. There was an organization behind it all. Shortly after we returned to Israel from Washington in December 1987, my friends and I shifted our focus. On May 1, 1988, over one hundred representatives of our aliyah convened. Former prisoners of Zion, ex-Refuseniks, and long-established immigrants founded the Soviet Jewry Zionist Forum to push our concerns onto Israel’s agenda. I was elected chairman, and Yuli Edelstein, the future Speaker of the Knesset, became the deputy. The demonstration in Washington had brought the number four hundred thousand into American Jewish consciousness. But was Israel prepared for such a massive aliyah?
Our first meetings with Israel’s leaders answered the question: no, they weren’t. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was friendly but skeptical. “Of course I’d like them to come,” Peres began, “but only a few will actually arrive. We’ll get ten to fifteen thousand at most. Why should they leave? Now that Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost are bringing freedom there, they can enjoy life. Why would they come to a war-torn country? First, we have to make peace.”
Peres led Israel’s Labor Party. Peres and other Labor Zionist romantics believed that, with Gorbachev’s reforms, the Soviet Union was finally moving in the right direction, toward the socialism of their youth. Meanwhile, they worried about Israel’s future, with no peace in sight.
Israel’s right-wing prime minister Yitzhak Shamir had no illusions about a human face to socialism or an expressway to Middle East peace. He offered the same estimate but a different rationale. “We’ll get ten to fifteen thousand at most. We have our intelligence sources,” he said when we met. “They report that most Jews in Moscow are studying English, not Hebrew. They want to go to America.” Shamir was still grumbling about the dropouts.
Both Israeli leaders, however, offered similar assurances. If Russian Jews arrived in such large numbers, the more the better. Each insisted, “Israel will be ready. You’ll see how the whole country will mobilize.”
When the gates of the Soviet Union started opening in 1989, Israel really did mobilize. As the Iron Curtain fell, Jewish Agency representatives fanned out throughout the vast, teetering Soviet empire. They assisted impressively, from filling out visa requests to arranging flights to expediting processing at Ben-Gurion Airport. Not enough housing for so many people? “No problem, have some savlanoot,” patience. Soon, tens of thousands of caravan towns started popping up, from Beersheba to Haifa.
Not enough absorption centers? “No problem, smoch alai,” trust me. Soon, the government started a more individualized approach, direct absorption. Every immigrant received a sal klita—an absorption basket, thousands of dollars in subsidies to get settled. American Jewry raised more than $1 billion to help, thanks to the Federations’ massive campaign, Operation Exodus.
Tough conditions? “No problem, yihyeh beseder,” it’ll be OK, they said, hitting you on the shoulder. “You think you have it bad, we had it worse! We had to drain swamps, resist malaria, fight Arabs, dodge the British!”
We joked that Russian immigrants were limping around lopsided, with their right shoulders pounded down by every Israeli shouting “Savlanoot-smoch-alai-yihyeh-beseder,” as if it were one word.
The Israeli government’s no-nonsense, one-size-fits-all approach to newcomers worked. After Israel’s establishment in 1948, waves of immigration, starting with the European Holocaust survivors, soon doubled the population. In the 1950s and ’60s, 850,000 immigrants expelled from the Arab countries and North Africa arrived: the Sephardim, today known as Mizrahim. Each time, Israel met the challenge. Refugees from over one hundred countries who spoke dozens of languages became Hebrew-speaking Israelis.
Now, in the 1990s, Israel had to absorb an aliyah one-fifth the size of its current population. But Israel’s melting-pot approach was paternalistic. Sabras (native-born Israelis) and early immigrants believed they knew what newcomers needed. They had already proved they were on the right side of history by becoming Israeli before Hitler’s rise.
The Israelis’ embrace of Holocaust survivors had been heroic. The small, poor, struggling country, surrounded by enemies, had doubled its population, welcoming home strangers with strange customs and strange languages. But Israelis saw these people as passive victims. The nickname young Israelis threw around in the street at these European survivors was chilling: sabonim, soap bars, because that’s what Nazis had made out of some dead Jews’ skin.
By contrast, Israelis were proud to be making history in their country. So, before joining their fellow Jews as actors in the new Jewish drama, these newcomers had to have the deference, oppression, and weakness of the exile—Galut—drained out of them, like the swamps themselves.
As planeloads of Jews expelled from Arab countries arrived in the 1950s, the paternalism became more problematic. The Socialist Zionist leaders—Russian Jews who had arrived at the beginning of the 1900s with the Second and Third Aliyah—decided for the new immigrants, not with them. Ben-Gurion Zionists, leading the government and the Jewish Agency, wanted to turn these people into New Jews—proud, strong Israelis.
Suddenly, these secular Ashkenazim were deciding what kind of identity the newcomers from Morocco, Yemen, and Iraq should have, how much of their culture they could keep, which Jewish traditions they should maintain, where they would live, what jobs they would have, and what their new names would be.
This process left psychological and social scars. In 1977, Menachem Begin of the Likud Party—himself Ashkenazi like all of us Russians, Poles, and Western Europeans—rose to power as the first mainstream Israeli politician responsive to Mizrahi anger.
Their new name reflected their trauma. Before moving to Israel, they were Moroccan, Algerian, Syrian, or Libyan Jews. While they shared Sephardi (from Spain) liturgy and rituals, no collective identity linked them politically as Mizrahim, meaning Easterners. The Jewish state had bestowed that identity on them. Eventually, Mizrahim started expressing their anger politically. Seven years after Begin’s election, the ultrareligious party Shas emerged, promising to use Mizrahi political power to revitalize Sephardic culture and pride.
In Russia, we never appreciated the depth of the Mizrahi fury. When I arrived, I heard constant complaints about Ashkenazi domination and discrimination, insults and arrogance. As usual, the cabbies nailed it. One driver in 1986 told me how exciting my release was for Israelis. “We were all crying,” he said. Then, he added, “But you understand that if you weren’t Ashkenazi, if you were Moroccan like me, they never would have organized such a reception for you.”
“Even if someone spent nine years in prison?” I asked.
“Of course,” he snorted, listing Mizrahi Jews he claimed the state neglected.
A few years later, when Soviet immigration was at its peak, another taxi driver told me, “I’m so happy to see how you Russians are coming in big numbers to Israel. Together, you Russians and we Sephardim will show those Ashkenazi Jews who’s the boss now.”
Israel was a unique laboratory. Usually, a nation-state produces a Diaspora as people leave. Here, the far-flung Diaspora was producing a new nation-state. It came with no instruction manual, except its founders’ imaginations.
Reading history, I learned that the contemporary debate about how to handle immigrants reflected the founders’ clash regarding the legacy of the Diaspora. Modern Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, was a proud Jewish nationalist who loved European culture. He respected the deep connections that immigrants brought from their first homes to their old-new homeland. He wanted to welcome Jews from all over to transplant their individual characters and skills, not abandon them. Then, they would evolve together to be transformed. A mosaic requires stones and cement. The resulting “Mosaic mosaic,” a Jewish patchwork, would be fused together by the tradition of Moses while dazzling everyone with its worldly diversity.
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, envisioned an all-new Israeli melting pot, not a Diaspora-tinged mosaic. Ben-Gurion considered that sacred Zionist task, what was formally called the “ingathering of the exiles,” part of “a wholesale revolution in a Jew’s image and his way of life.”
Hoping to make two thousand years of weakness vanish, Ben-Gurion wrote, “With their arrival in their homeland, this Jewish dust (avak adam), living among strangers, dependent on vagrancy and serfdom, coalesces into an independent, national brigade, attached to and rooted in its great history.” Israelis were saving newcomers, not demeaning them. Redemption would be achieved when each immigrant exorcised the broken, exiled Jew from within and became a proud, assertive Israeli: the New Jew.
Ben-Gurion’s homogenizing vision long dominated Israeli society, guiding the government agencies responsible for absorption. Then, in the 1990s, the Russian immigrants resisted. They didn’t consider themselves “dust.” They were fleeing the Soviet system, not Russian culture. Many were proud of their Russian identity. Refusing to see their past as wholly negative, they demanded another approach.
This conflict played out for me in 1990, when some famous Moscow actors and directors contacted me. They were considering aliyah. They wondered if Israel would consider establishing a Russian-language theater. I thought, “Wow, here’s Israel’s chance to show potential immigrants that it’s not a cultural backwater.” This old-new land could absorb customs Russian Jews cherished in the old country, especially theater. I rushed to the Ministry of Education and Culture with the good news.
But few Israelis shared my enthusiasm. “What you want is against Zionism,” I was told. “We won’t promote Russian-language theater. We never approved of theater in German, Romanian, or Bulgarian, not even Yiddish.” They added, “Don’t you as a Zionist recognize the miracle of bringing a dead language back to life? We must strengthen the connection between Hebrew and the Jewish people. All immigrants should learn our language. Your approach will prevent newcomers from becoming part of Israel.”
Perhaps such rigidity made sense during the first years of state building. The reviver of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, only spoke to his wife and children in Hebrew, despite missing many words necessary for everyday life. Ben-Yehuda’s first son didn’t speak until he was four. A century later, we didn’t need to be so unyielding.
I went to the other Zionist capital, New York. Our friends from the New York Federation, America’s most generous Jewish philanthropy, gave the Forum the first $24,000 to produce a few Russian-language performances. Our Soviet Jewry Zionist Forum found more money for the start-up, which we called the Gesher Theatre. Gesher means bridge. Over the years, performing in two languages, the theater has won many prizes. It’s hard to believe that hard-core Zionists first considered this successful Zionist project antithetical to their cause.
Immigrant organizations often aligned with political parties. We founded the Zionist Forum to give immigrants an independent voice. We would be partners and fellow citizens. We had lots of experience fighting for ourselves—including confronting the Zionist Establishment—and had friendships in the Diaspora to finance our independence.
With everyone now recognizing that we were on the eve of a massive aliyah, the Zionist Forum spoke out publicly and sharply, criticizing the Jewish Agency and the government for not being prepared. Once, after I made some peppery comments in the Jerusalem Post, the head of the Jewish Agency, Simcha Dinitz, invited me for a chat. Dinitz and his wife, Tamar, had welcomed Avital warmly when he was Israel’s ambassador in Washington. “Natan,” he said sincerely, “you and your friends from the Zionist Forum are heroes. We love you. We respect you guys. You fought the Soviet Union.”
I knew what was coming next.
“But,” he said, “you don’t understand how democracy works, or what works in Israel. Watch the other immigrant organizations. If you want to criticize, go ahead,” he waved me on. “It’s a free country. You’ll be popular. Journalists will interview you happily. But you won’t help even one new immigrant, because you won’t get a shekel from us. Instead,” he proposed, “stop criticizing. Work with us, and you’ll have money, influence, whatever you need.”
As a Labor Party veteran, Dinitz understood how Labor’s version of Israeli democracy, revolving around strict party discipline, operated. The Association of Soviet Immigrants, organized by Labor in the 1970s, remained fully dependent on the party.
The same article that had annoyed Dinitz prompted a phone call from New York. It was a man whom I had never met named Joseph Gruss. “You write that the support the government gives to new immigrants for buying apartments is not enough,” the retired Wall Street financier said. “You proposed a special fund to help them. How much additional money do you think will be needed to settle those who come in the next year?”
We were at the beginning of an aliyah whose size even we insiders hadn’t yet grasped. My understanding of business and real estate was minimal then. I threw out what sounded like a big number: $20 million. Actually, it was a drop in the bucket.
“OK,” Gruss said, “I will give you $1 million. Find another nineteen donors to match me.”
He called two weeks later, asking, “Did you find the next nineteen?” I had started running the numbers, looking around, but had not found any additional donors. I started mumbling about needing more time.
Gruss cut me off. “I am old,” he said. He was eighty-six. “I don’t have time to wait. I will give you the $20 million.” Thanks to the creative approach of David Blumberg, the CEO of Israel’s largest mortgage bank, Bank Tefahot, Gruss’s gift grew to $80 million worth of second-mortgage credit, which helped 7,500 families purchase apartments, often with me or other members of our presidium signing as guarantors. Many Israelis who knew about guaranteeing mortgages warned us not to sign personally. Nevertheless, everyone paid up on time. Other banks, seeing the mortgage business booming, soon rushed to compete.
That became our approach. We came up with ideas, from Russian TV to a system offering legal advice to new ways to teach math and physics. Representatives of the Establishment would usually say, “No, you don’t need it. We know better than you how to absorb immigrants.” We would then raise some money from old friends in the Diaspora to start the project. We were nonpartisan, attracting support from across the political spectrum.
We wanted Russian-language summer camps for new immigrants. This idea also offended the melting-pot sensibility, so we were told, “We speak Hebrew, not Russian.” I approached Charles Bronfman, the Canadian philanthropist whose wife, Andrea Bronfman, had been a leader in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. That summer, we ran a camp. The next summer, the Israeli government took it over.
We thought of seeding entrepreneurs with small-business loans. This time, the bureaucrats lacked the funds and the faith in the project. I approached Ludwig Jesselson and George Klein, two New York businessmen who had embraced Avital like a daughter. Again, we set a precedent.
The Zionist Forum became a trade union, a civil rights organization, and a laboratory for different social initiatives, all wrapped in one. And through the growing partnership between immigrants and the Israeli government, the Forum reframed the dialogue between the Diaspora and Israel.
On my first trip to America, I met Mort Zuckerman, the scrappy Montreal-born real estate mogul who used his money to buy U.S. News & World Report. When he interviewed me, we started comparing experiences: his as a prisoner in New York’s high society, and mine as a free man in the Gulag. We became close friends.
Mort’s company, Boston Properties, developed and managed more than thirty million square feet of buildings, and he had many homes. Eventually, I said to him, “With all the houses you have and build, we found a good one for you in Jerusalem. Isn’t it time for you to have a house in Israel too?” He agreed. That is how we got our headquarters.
Mort came to Jerusalem with an entourage of celebrities to dedicate Zuckerman House. As we nailed the mezuzah on the doorpost, this crusty billionaire choked up. Remembering how his grandparents had come to Montreal from the Ukraine, Mort said, “This is the first time I feel that, finally, I did something for them.”
“This made the trip,” the TV broadcaster Barbara Walters exclaimed. “I never imagined I’d see Mort so sentimental.”
These kinds of friends made our work possible and preserved our independence.
Soon, even the resistance in the Jewish Agency melted. Mendel Kaplan, a leader of the South African Jewish community who became the first non-American chairman of the board of the Jewish Agency, was impressively open-minded. “You can criticize the process all you want,” he told me. “It’s healthy for us. But we have to raise tons of money to absorb your people, and we need you. As long as you also help us raise money for absorption, we will finance your Zionist Forum.”
This informal agreement kept me traveling to America, fundraising for the United Jewish Appeal’s billion-dollar Operation Exodus campaign. In return, we proved Simcha Dinitz wrong. Our independent Zionist Forum gained a substantial $2 million budget, half from the Jewish Agency, half from private donors.
Israelis had never seen such an influential organization for immigrants. Our budget was larger than all the dozens of new immigrant organizations combined. Continuing our tradition as Soviet Jewish activists, we partnered with the Establishment while criticizing it. Sometimes, it got touchy. Often, after our loud protests, some ministers grumbled, “Why are we giving them public money? So they can embarrass us with their protests?” But we were careful. Jewish Agency dollars went exclusively to absorbing immigrants. Donor dollars bankrolled the protests.
When gossips started speculating that the Forum might become a political party, the knives sharpened. The head of the Knesset’s aliyah and absorption committee talked about “slaughtering the sacred cows around us, starting with Sharansky.” Soon, the leading Hebrew daily Maariv recycled the complaints the Liaison Office had about Avital and me never following the Zionist line.
It was not the first critical article about me in my new home, but it was the first one attacking Avital for her stubborn independence during the struggle. I was furious. I stopped speaking to Maariv’s editor, Dan Margalit. Years later, he cornered me and asked what was wrong. I mentioned the article. He was surprised, saying he and his readers knew not to take that grumbling seriously. By then, I had entered politics, and had learned the hard way to be less sensitive to press attacks.
The Zionist Forum’s activities kept me busy. Recalling my Moscow years, when my friends and I were so eager to become Israelis, I now often wondered: What are we fighting for? In 1967, when I discovered my identity, it seemed simpler. Feeling like I had no identity because it had been stripped by Communism, I just wanted to embrace a new one. I wanted to belong immediately, to join a different history, a different people, a different country.
My friends and I did not know about Herzl’s mosaic or Ben-Gurion’s melting pot, but we were instinctively Ben-Gurionites. Fleeing from slavery, we hoped to fit into a new, free, Israeli life. After arriving in Israel with the other Russians, I realized that identity is not a one-dimensional either-or. It’s not a battery you can replace. It’s more like fuel: when you add more into your tank, the new mixes with what was there before. Herzl’s vision captured this contradiction. I now understood how I could feel so tied to Israel, yet still feel most comfortable speaking Russian.
In the Zionist Forum, we kept weighing how to offer the newcomers an identity while accepting their Russian accents. Seeking a balance, we broke the melting pot’s paternalistic paradigm. That’s why we resurrected Herzl’s “Mosaic mosaic.”
Even with the melting pot shattered, even with all the Diaspora’s generosity, our impact was limited. A historic migration on this scale required billions of dollars, not millions. Ministries would have to change their priorities, and the Knesset would have to pass new laws.
Only a party representing the immigrants’ interests could deliver so much. Still, I resisted the idea of a Russian immigrant party for years. I feared this would build a Russian ghetto, just like Shas was further ghettoizing the Mizrahim. It seemed to violate the Zionist ideal that had long motivated me, of one people returning and building one state together. Wasn’t it better to defend the immigrants’ interests by making our case nationally and cultivating influence within each major party?
I was also personally reluctant. I fell naturally into championing the Soviet immigrants. It maintained my dissident spirit, even though I was now a patriot, supporting my democratic country rather than trying to escape my oppressive birthplace. But as I became controversial, as Labor and Likud insiders stopped bickering just long enough to grumble about me, I felt uneasy.
As soon as I became involved in politics, friends warned, “You’re going to lose your standing with Israelis. Everything’s so factionalized.” I had tried not to let the adulation go to my head. I knew I couldn’t be everybody’s hero. Still, I wanted to preserve that unique feeling I had in the Gulag of being connected to all my people. I knew that, by becoming a politician, this imaginary connection risked being broken.
Ultimately, the pressing social challenges the immigrants faced changed my opinion about the need for a separate political party—and about my future. It was impossible for so many educated, ambitious, energetic people to move to the Jewish state, in such a dizzyingly short time, without causing tension. Some Israelis who now faced unexpected job pressure wondered, “How did all these people get all these degrees from all these places we never heard of in Siberia?” Some Israeli professional associations spread rumors about doctors and engineers buying degrees on the Russian black market, like everything else in the Soviet Union.
As the immigrants blamed the government for its failures, some government ministers blamed the immigrants. Ora Namir, the minister of labor and social welfare in the Labor government, called Russian immigrants a social burden. She said Israel should be more “selective” in accepting future immigrants. She claimed that younger, productive Russian Jews sent their elderly relatives to Israel, “to relieve themselves of their care, as they go to the United States.” The Iraqi-born minister of police dismissed the aliyah as a “Mafia immigration.” Newspaper headlines screamed about Russian prostitutes and white slavery scandals.
In the years after the Communist economies collapsed, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European women were swept into sex trafficking. First, they moved into Western Europe, but it soon hit Israel. Because this spike in prostitution coincided with the big Russian wave of immigration, some people linked the two. It became too easy to caricature the Russian aliyah as one of whores and mafiosi.
The shift in the image of Soviet Jews was dizzying. One friend was hired for a computing job. On her first day in the office, her boss, pleased with himself for hiring a Russian immigrant, asked, “Why are there so many prostitutes among you?”
Smiling mischievously, she answered, “There are many of us Russians all around. If you go to the theater, you’ll see us. If you go to the philharmonic, you’ll see us. If you go to the chess club, you’ll see us. Where one goes determines what one sees.”
With every defensive interview, with every press conference, with every lovely new initiative encouraging dialogue between Russian newcomers and veteran Israelis, we felt more and more helpless. It’s hard to break popular stereotypes. Eventually, after years of squirming and defending, we decided there had been enough explaining, enough apologizing. It was time to change tactics. We wanted to place representatives of new immigrants in all those places where the decisions about the future of our community and our country were being made. The best way to fight prejudice was to sit on municipal councils and in parliament.
There, we would argue together, decide together. We would share responsibility on housing, education, and jobs. As a common language emerged, stereotypes would fade and friendships would form. By arguing together, we’d start swimming together.
The Russian rookies had to join the internal Israeli dialogue. To do this, we needed a political party. So we—a band of former dissidents who excelled at street demonstrations, public spectacles, and sweeping statements—would have to become politicians. We would even have to learn the art of compromise.
In early press interviews, I said a successful immigrant party should not be a lobby in perpetuity. Once the process of integration started working as it should, our party, uniting new immigrants from different ideological camps, would no longer be needed. If we succeeded, our party and its agenda would become irrelevant. To make my point, I kept saying, even in front of reporters, that our party hoped to commit suicide as quickly as possible.
My colleagues were not amused. “What kind of a leader are you?” they asked. “How can you kill us off before we’ve been fully born?” I learned that party founders have to believe their new party will last forever and constantly contribute to the public good. I was also learning that politics and my ironic sense of humor didn’t match.
Launching a new party is expensive. The existing parties received government funds, a certain amount for each seat won in the previous election. We had no money, and our base was penniless immigrants. Once again, old friends helped. The $1 million we needed to establish ourselves as an electoral force came from a Bank Hapoalim loan, guaranteed by Mort Zuckerman and the Jewish philanthropist Ambassador Ronald Lauder.
Unlike other newly created parties, we were committed to democratic procedures from the start. Our list of candidates for every Knesset election was determined by a secret ballot, involving hundreds of our activists.
Before going public, I felt I should inform one politician privately. Benjamin Netanyahu had been instrumental in helping Avital navigate New York and Washington. As the leader of the opposition Likud Party for the upcoming 1996 election, he was probably counting on my support. I expected him to be disappointed that I would be running my own party, which would remain neutral in the prime ministerial contest to keep focused on our agenda.
When I informed him of our plans, Bibi was extremely gracious. “If that’s what you decide, I wish you much success, and I hope we will work together in the government,” he said. “But I want to offer you one piece of advice. Launching a party is difficult and expensive. There are many financial and legal questions. And the mix of politics and money is always explosive. Never touch money, at all. Don’t touch financial questions, don’t sign papers. Hire professionals to handle it all, to do all the finances and the accounting. If you don’t stay completely clean, they will blacken your name before you know it. You will be a target for police, reporters, and gossips.”
It was generous and timely advice. Today, so many scandals later, I understand that many people will hear it as ironic. But the Bibi I know has always cared about power, not money. I have seen politicians calculate how much more money they could be making as lawyers and use that gap to justify their financial finagling. That’s not Bibi.
When I first met him, Bibi was Israel’s thirty-eight-year-old ambassador to the United Nations, and he told me he would be prime minister one day. Less than ten years later, he became Israel’s youngest prime minister ever. Since then, I have watched him study power, build power, obsess about power, and sometimes sacrifice friendships for power. But I never saw him try to turn his power into a source of income. I also remember how careful he was about insulating financial matters from party affairs.
As for our party, quite predictably, after we won our first election, false rumors claimed that Russian Mafia money was funding us. Police investigations followed. Because our party of amateurs relied on professionals to manage our finances from A to Z, we were protected from many sloppy mistakes that could have been used against us unfairly. “You got out of this unblemished,” the police interrogator pronounced with surprise and respect.
From the beginning, we had a good name for the party: Yisrael B’Aliyah, a play on words that emphasized Israel with immigration and Israel ascending. We also had two perfect slogans. Trying to smash the melting-pot paternalism, we proclaimed, “There is no integration without representation!” And, thanks to one of our young American volunteers, Ron Dermer, a second slogan emerged: “We are a different political party, we go to prison… first.”
After the May 1996 elections, seven representatives of our new party joined the Knesset, including two of us in the cabinet. Within two years of our party’s founding, a series of municipal elections brought dozens of new immigrants into government, some of whom barely spoke Hebrew. We had deputy mayors in cities from Beersheba to Haifa.
The great Russian migration became part of the solution, not just part of the problem. We were finally swimming together with our fellow Israelis. The idea of members of a lost generation passively watching what was happening to them was buried, at least for this aliyah.